


stop with my pretending (i will not bend)

by shineyma



Series: a storm you're starting [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24827728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: Jemma did warn them.
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Grant Ward
Series: a storm you're starting [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/304995
Comments: 7
Kudos: 104





	stop with my pretending (i will not bend)

**Author's Note:**

> Ta-da! Week twenty-five! And it was a rough one, y'all, I'm not gonna lie. I actually had more for this fic planned but I was like "nope, can't do it." So you get this rather than getting nothing.
> 
> Hope you're all well! Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review! <3

Jemma did warn the team, heartless traitors though they are. They have only themselves to blame for their failure to listen—and fail they did, if the easy way Grant strolls into Vault C is any indication. Were they in any way prepared for his inevitable vengeance, he’d be in much more of a hurry.

As it is, his entrance is wholly casual, unaccompanied by the sounds of gunfire or distant screams. He may well have simply decided to drop in and say hello on his way somewhere else.

No doubt he has an equally casual greeting prepared, a flippant comment on the tables being turned or something of the like, but he only gets as far as opening his mouth. That’s when Cameron looks up from his storybook, sees him, and lets out a delighted, “Daddy!”

Grant’s expression cracks, and Jemma’s heart along with it.

“Hey, buddy,” he says roughly. “I’ll have you out of there in just a second, okay?”

“Yay!” Cameron scrambles out of her lap. “Mummy, we go!”

“Yes, darling,” she agrees. “We’re leaving. Do you want to bring any of your things with you?”

He looks around, wrinkling his nose—and Jemma can hardly blame him. SHIELD deigned to provide amusements and comforts for them, true, but all the brightly colored blankets in the world can’t disguise that Vault C is a dank basement cell.

(And those amusements and comforts were _very_ cheap, obviously provided from a bargain bin. Not something Jemma would begrudge in other circumstances, but considering the state of her relations with the team…)

After a second, he looks back to her, and his face brightens.

“Just Mummy,” he says, and tugs on her hand. “We go, Mummy, we go.”

She allows him to pull her to her feet, smiling all the while—careful, as always, not to let him see how his words hurt her. He didn’t suffer any brain damage in the Izmaylovs’ attack, thank goodness, but the terror and trauma of it—and of the team’s cruel treatment, keeping them so often separated—has taken its toll. His vocabulary has regressed significantly.

He’ll recover, she’s sure. He’s still as bright and inquisitive as ever, still every bit as sharp—he’s just lost a bit of his ability to communicate it, that’s all. Going home will help.

( _Home_. Ha.)

“Here we go,” Grant says, and Jemma tears her eyes away from Cameron’s beaming smile to find his father removing some form of electronic device from the cell’s control tablet. A hacking mechanism, she presumes; she knows the tablet is password protected at Gonzales’ insistence. “Alright, out you come. Cam, you think you can spare a hug for your old man?”

“Hug!” He tows Jemma over to the line demarking the barrier and bounces in place. “Yes, Daddy! Let out!”

Grant drops the barrier even as he’s dropping to his knees. By the time it falls, he’s ready and waiting to welcome Cameron into his arms.

For perhaps the first time ever, Jemma doesn’t resent the hug at all.

Oh, she tries. Of course she does. SHIELD’s crimes aside, this is still the man who imprisoned her, terrorized her, and used their son as a weapon against her. She’s spent _years_ hating him—hating him and begrudging every inch he gained, every piece of her own heart that softened towards him. She wants to hate him still.

But she can’t. Watching him bury his face in their son’s hair, watching his shoulders move on a tremulous inhale, knowing every drop of the love and _relief_ he feels—she can’t muster up so much as a mild dislike.

The team, the friends and family she spent _years_ dreaming of reuniting with, used her son as a weapon against her, too—and far more harshly. Grant has only ever used the threat of separating her from Cameron—and even that only temporarily—to force her obedience. SHIELD?

SHIELD made her think Cameron was _dead_. They showed her a corpse, let her cry before it for ages. It was _hours_ before they told her the truth—and even then only because May forced their hand. Since then, they’ve kept him away from her most of the time, only relenting to allow him to sleep in her cell because he wasn’t sleeping at all without her.

Every night, he’s brought to her crying and shaken. Every morning, he’s ripped, screaming, out of her arms again.

She can’t forgive that. She _won’t_. Not ever.

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise her that all the bad feeling, all the resentment, all the hate and fear and anger she spent years building as a physical wall against Grant seem to have transferred neatly to SHIELD instead. Watching him hug their son, all that’s left in her is gratitude and relief.

Well, that and a desperate need to get Cameron away from the Playground.

“We should go,” she says. “I presume you have an exit strategy?”

“I do.” Grant pushes to his feet without letting go of Cameron. Jemma sympathizes; it’s been weeks since she got him back, and even now, it’s wretched having him out of her arms. “Gonna be pretty messy, though.”

It’s said as a test, she thinks. He’s waiting to see how she reacts to the implied threat against the team.

She doesn’t flinch away from his heavy gaze. “Good.”

Cameron wiggles a little in Grant’s arms—not attempting to escape, just trying to get comfortable. She wishes him luck, poor thing; tac vests are useful, but hardly soft.

“Home, Daddy?” he asks. “Soon?”

Grant’s eyes flick briefly towards Jemma—he’s noticed the change in Cameron’s speech pattern, of course—but return quickly to their son.

“Yeah, buddy,” he says. “Real soon. It might get scary for a bit before we get there, though—you think you could do me a favor?”

Cameron looks deeply skeptical. “W’sorta favor?”

Grant grins. For once, Jemma doesn’t hate how much that boyish expression echoes Cameron’s own.

“Nothing too bad,” he promises, shifting Cameron to one arm so he can dig into the pack hanging off his shoulder with the other. “It’s just, I think my friend here might need a hug—”

“Octy!” Cameron shouts, snatching his plush octopus right out of Grant’s hand. “He safe!”

Tears blur Jemma’s view of her son hugging his favorite toy. He’s missed Agent Octopus (so named by Grant, of course) every single night—just one more thing SHIELD stole from him.

It’s silly of her to cry over a toddler reunited with a toy, and yet—

“Mummy!” Cameron says, twisting to look for her. “Octy!”

He holds the octopus in her direction, obviously expecting her to be just as overjoyed, and she belatedly realizes she hasn’t left the cell yet. She’s still on the wrong side of the downed barrier, an observer frozen in her prison.

Grant’s expression says he’s noticed, too—and that he’s reading into it.

Holding his eyes, she steps over the line. She isn’t frightened by the victory in his resulting smile.

“So it is,” she says, turning her eyes back to Cameron. “Hello, Agent Octopus! Have you been as brave as Cameron while we’ve been away?”

“No,” Grant says, affecting the silly voice he always uses when speaking on the toy’s behalf. “I could never be as brave as Cameron. I’m glad we’re together again.”

“Me too,” Cameron says, and looks expectantly to Jemma.

“And me,” she agrees, and draws close enough to accept Agent Octopus for a brief hug of her own. “Cameron can keep you safe on the way home, dear.”

She kisses the fuzzy little head, then passes the toy back to Cameron—pairing it with a kiss to _his_ head, as well.

“I keep safe,” he agrees, and hugs Agent Octopus close.

“Thanks, buddy,” Grant says, smiling down at him. “We’ll have you home in no time.” There’s a challenge in his face when he looks to Jemma. “Any objections?”

She wishes there were. She wishes—

No. No, she doesn’t wish. Hatred is exhausting and there’s so much of it in her.

If she must hate the team—and she must, she _must_ after what they’ve done—she doesn’t _want_ to hate Grant as well. It’s a relief to be free of that burden. To look at him holding their son and see her husband, not a monster. A man to love, not fear.

She breathes out. The world has changed beneath her feet once more. SHIELD is the enemy, and Hydra—Hydra who kept her prisoner, who forced her to do unspeakable things, who left her trapped with a frankly terrifying man she’s hated more than she’s loved—Hydra is home. The frankly terrifying man is here as a savior, not a captor. She doesn’t hate him and doesn’t even want to.

Cameron is alive and happy. They won’t be separated any longer. Nothing else matters.

“No,” she says. “No objections at all.”

Grant smiles and extends his free hand. Jemma doesn’t hesitate to take it.

+++

Grant’s claims of a messy exit strategy prove untrue. The Playground is practically deserted, at least of SHIELD agents—though they do hear the occasional burst of gunfire echoing in the corridors, every person they actually cross paths with on the way out is Hydra.

All of them, without fail, salute Grant and call him _sir_.

Jemma doesn’t comment on it in the moment, as her first priority is getting Cameron as far from the Playground as possible. He’s upset by the gunfire, distant though it is—it only reminds him of the Izmaylovs’ attack—and once they’re secure in an armored car, speeding away as part of a convoy, all of her attention is on calming him down. It doesn’t help that the rescue interrupted his bedroom routine; he’s overtired and overtaxed, and even being held in Jemma’s lap and sung to doesn’t calm him as it usually does.

By the time they reach Hydra, he’s cried himself to sleep.

“He okay?” Grant asks as the car slows to a stop.

“Physically, yes.” She runs her fingers through Cameron’s hair, smoothing a few errant strands. “But he’s badly traumatized. I want a therapist for him.”

“Consider it done,” he says, and pulls out his phone. “Evie’ll set it up.”

The name is unfamiliar. “Evie?”

Text sent, Grant tucks his phone away and slides out of the backseat, holding his arms out to accept their sleeping son so Jemma can stand as well. He waits until she’s out of the car to clarify, “My assistant.”

“…You have an assistant?” Jemma asks, stunned. To be fair, she’s paid little attention to Grant’s work over the years—but truly?

“It’s a new development,” he says, and adjusts his grip on Cameron. “Come on.”

A veritable phalanx of guards, all of them unfamiliar, fall into step around them on the way to the lift, and it’s the final straw. Their simple escape, the deference of every agent, the whole production of the convoy, Grant’s new assistant, and now a guard escort for a walk across the _parking garage_ —

Something very odd is happening here.

“What is going _on_?” she demands.

Grant hits the button for the lift with far more force than it requires.

“Whitehall,” he says, very pleasantly, “didn’t think rescuing you and Cameron should be a priority. I disagreed.”

There’s a gruesome story hiding behind his little smile, which perhaps should bother Jemma. Knowing Whitehall was ready to condemn her son to life in SHIELD custody, however…

“What did you do?” she asks.

“Well, you know what they say. Cut off one head…” He shrugs. “After that, there was an opening, so I stepped in.”

Jemma…needs a moment to absorb that. While she does, the lift arrives.

“You took over as head?” she asks finally, trailing him into it. The guards don’t follow suit.

“Yep.”

“And does this promotion have anything to do with how easy it was to escape?” she presses.

“That it does.” Grant gives her a wicked grin. “I set up a nice little distraction for SHIELD. They’re all hands on deck in San Juan right now.”

That should concern her—for the innocent people in San Juan, if nothing else—but looking at her son’s tear-stained face and white-knuckled grip on his plush octopus, even in sleep, she simply can’t manage anything but relief. Whatever’s happening in San Juan, it made it possible for Grant to bring them home. She can’t regret it.

“And the Izmaylovs?” she asks.

“On the detention level,” he says. “Wishing they were dead.”

At that, Jemma feels nothing but fierce gladness—fierce gladness that is swiftly replaced by surprise when the doors of the lift slide open. Distracted as she was by the conversation, she didn’t realize until now that the button Grant hit wasn’t for their floor.

“Yeah,” he says, seeing her hesitation. “The head gets the penthouse suite. Don’t worry, I redecorated.”

She believes him. The sitting room the lift opens on is nice, painted a cheerful yellow, with a comfortable-looking blue fabric sofa and loveseat arranged before a wide-screen television. Though she didn’t know Whitehall particularly well, she has a hard time picturing him in such a pleasant space.

“You’ve been busy,” she says, a bit faintly.

Taking over Hydra, capturing the Izmaylovs, moving into and redecorating the penthouse suite, arranging a trap for SHIELD, _and_ rescuing her and Cameron, all in the span of a few weeks? It’s honestly impressive.

Grant shifts Cameron to one hip, freeing one arm so he can reel her in for a quick, hard kiss. In contrast, his tone is surprisingly gentle.

“I don’t sleep well without you,” he says.

Jemma thinks of her nights in Vault C, curled up on that tiny, hard cot with Cameron, trying not to cry as she dreaded the coming dawn—counting down the seconds before he was taken from her once more.

She hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the last one she spent in Grant’s arms.

“No,” she says. “Neither do I.”

If Grant is surprised by her easy agreement, he doesn’t show it. He only smiles and wraps his arm around her shoulders.

It doesn’t make her feel trapped. She has no need to shove him away or to flee. She’s only comforted, warmed by the touch and reassured by his strength. She doesn’t flinch when his lips meet her temple.

So much has changed since the last time they stood in this building.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” he says, and for once, Jemma doesn’t argue the label.


End file.
